#878 - David Senra - 15 Harsh Truths From History’s Greatest Founders

Phil Knight's Shoe Dog is considered one of the near perfect entrepreneur autobiographies, telling the story of Nike in a relatable way, focusing on the struggle leading up to the IPO.

There's ideas worth billions in a $30 history book. History's greatest entrepreneurs all learned from history's greatest entrepreneurs. So that is a direct quote from Poor Charlie's Almanack.

Henry Ford's autobiography, I think is like a mandatory, like, I think entrepreneurs should read it over and over again.

This great book called Invent and Wander is the collected writings of Jeff Bezos, taking his shareholder letters and transcripts of his speeches, providing insight into his thinking while building Amazon.

There's one canonical biography of Rockefeller called Titan. It's like 800 pages. It's great. That's fine. I've read it like two times.

This book is 250 pages of how he built standard oil. It's called John D, the founding fathers of the Rockefellers.

He wrote an autobiography when he was 30 called The Education of a Bodybuilder, right? The first 110 pages of that book is Arnold telling his life story at 30.

So then you start, um, there's this book called The Outsiders and I pick it up. I start reading about it.

The Steve Jobs archive, which is run by Steve's widow, just released this free book you can read online called Make Something Wonderful, Steve Jobs in his own words.

He wrote an autobiography when he was 70 called Total Recall, but what's even better is he wrote an autobiography when he was 30 called The Education of a Bodybuilder.

The book Lift Off covers Elon Musk in the desperate early days of SpaceX, detailing the challenges he faced and his perseverance during that time.

A line from this book is mentioned in relation to a quote by Andre Gied about the necessity of repeating what needs to be said.

This was in that book Liftoff, which is really, again, I highly recommend that book because you can, again, read in a weekend.

Greg McKeown, an author of Essentialism, uh, was on the speaking circuits 10th year anniversary of Essentialism next month.

There's a great essay called how to do great work. It's by this guy, Paul Graham.

He picked up a book that changed his life when he was in law school. It's the autobiography of a guy named William Zeckendorf.

I'm rereading, uh, Rockefeller's autobiography that he wrote when he's like in his eighties.